


Ma Garas Mir Renan

by orphan_account



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Prostitution, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:33:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23647000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She left her clan for a woodcutter, where he died soon after and she was forced into prostitution to pay off his debts. Oldest tale in the book.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Ma Garas Mir Renan

_It was an accident,_ the hahren told her when he came to her door with news of her husband’s sudden death. He was lying. She knew that he was lying, and he knew that he was repeating a lie, but those were the words given to him by the city guard, and it was all that he had to offer. The guards did not come into the alienage in Rialto.

Later she taught the hahren the proper words to pray for the dead.

 _O Falon’Din_  
_Lethanavir—Friend to the Dead_  
_Guide my feet, calm my soul,_  
_Lead me to my rest._

These flat-ears were her friends and neighbors. Once she’d thought it terrible that they knew so little and cared less, but she’d learned differently in her short time among them. It was a different game they played, humoring the Chantry priests that came in from time to time to civilize them. They were hungry to taste scraps of elvish on their tongues. Their eyes drank in the vallaslin on her face. A raven down her nose, beak above her brows, wings outstretched. Talons scraped across her cheekbones and on her chin. A tribute to Dirthamen, she’d explained when the hahren asked, of the two lying ravens that he’d subdued and turned into his symbols.

The hahren had called Dirthamen _terrifying_ and questioned why someone would want such a thing on their face. “Crows have a different meaning in Antiva,” he’d warned her. But he wasn’t afraid of her. He was afraid of the guard.

She was wild and vicious. She could hunt, draw a bow, skin a deer, ride a halla. Flat-ears were not even permitted to hold weapons. They were powerless and drawn to her like moths to a flame. And so was the hahren. He was terrified of her, but he also protected her, his own secret weapon.

The hahren didn’t lie out of malicious desire. He was gifting her the words of those who’d brought news of her husband’s death. An honest gift of the lie. Later they grieved together as one family. These flat-ears called her _cousin_ and _auntie_ and cried and told her that her husband had gone to the Maker’s side. She was swift to correct them: Falon’Din gathered his spirit and led him to his last rest. Then she told them about their ageless ancestors that never died but went, willingly, to sleep.

A human came to the alienage the next day. He owned most of the apartments in the alienage and had learned, somehow, of her husband’s death. His appearance on her doorstep, pushing his way into her tiny living room, was an unwelcome violation. He had questions for her. Could she afford to pay her rent? Did she even have a job? Did the Dalish care at all about gold?

Her heart turned to ice as she stared him down.

He thought he could look at her, touch her, like one of the flat-ears. He must have been so comfortable to come into the alienage, knowing they were forbidden from bearing arms, unable to even learn, that they were inherently helpless. And he mistook her for the same.

Then he told her that he’d let her pay her rent a week late if she’d fuck him.

“If I ever see you again in my home,” she’d seethed, “I will skin you and hang your flesh outside my window like a flag of victory.”

He’d _laughed_. He tried to slap her, but she’d caught his wrist, and it was that first moment that he truly looked stunned. Another laugh. But this one was smaller, less certain. He left, telling her that her rent was due in two days.

She looked for work. No one would hire a _knife-ear_ , but they would pay coin for access to her body. She refused. She tried to sell her leather gloves, but the shopkeep offered next to nothing for them, not enough to make a difference.

It was late winter, then, and the clan had moved far away from Rialto. Shemlen nobles liked to flock to idyllic Antiva in the winter to bask in its warmth. The Dalish, in turn, drifted closer to Rivain. She could find the places where the clan buried their winter supplies in clay pots: preserves and salted jerky and pickled vegetables. Sooner or later the clan would come. But without coin, she’d starve a week out from the city.

The only place that would hire her was the brothel.

By then, she’d been evicted from her apartment, was caught stealing coin from a merchant, and had spent two weeks in jail. She had a bruise on her face, but the madame told her that she had a feral look that her clients would appreciate. _They like to conquer knife-ears,_ the madame said. It wasn’t supposed to be an insult.

She was Dalish. The Dalish did not submit.

Let the shemlen think they’d conquered her. Let them revel in their ridiculous lie.

She thought her first missed menses was because of stress or misery or lack of sleep. She’d ate little, slept worse, and had survived her husband by nearly a month. It happened from time to time, the absence of her monthly flow.

But it was gone the second month, too. And the third.

Spring was well in its height by then. Her clan would have come closer as it revisited the places where it had sowed seeds during the last lambing season. But no. She remembered one night that shemlens had discovered one of their wild farms and burned it to the ground when the clan returned. The Keeper would seek out somewhere new to grow their crops. She had no idea where they would go.

It was supposed to be temporary, her stay in the brothel.

Her husband’s creditors found her while she was working there, and they came to some sort of arrangement with the madame. The madame paid off the debts, then demanded that she repay her. Her husband’s debts became her own. It was not a deal made in good faith. She became a prisoner in the brothel.

The shemlen paid the madame for her. A few, a small few, were simply quite curious about her vallaslin, about her tongue, about their vulgar inquiries about the Dalish. Was it true that they tattooed their breasts and vulvas? Was it true the men laid on their backs while the women fucked them? Was it true the men had small, unsatisfying pricks? Was she not happy to be in glorious Antiva, where men had huge cocks and women laid on their backs while men fucked them?

She laid on her back and thought of all the ways that she could kill them.

More than one thought he could put his hands on her. One turned on her mid-coitus, wrapping his hands around her throat, threatening her over and over again. _No one would even care about a dead knife-ear. I could do this and not one person would fucking care._ She shoved her thumb in his eye, then wrapped her legs around his waist and used his weight to hurl him off the bed, sending his head into the wall. Then the brothel guards, little more than thugs, broke into the room and pulled them apart.

It was a long time before she’d stopped shaking.

Then she started to show and a different patron started to take notice of her. She wanted to stop until after the pregnancy, but the madame disagreed. There was a certain type of man that would pay extra for a visibly showing knife-ear. And he did.

It haunted her that her child was not, perhaps, her husband’s. She dreamed that she would give birth to a human child that looked too much like the dark-haired nobles that paid for her. She prayed to Mythal in the privacy of her own mind, the only privacy she had left.

_Do not make him human._

Her contractions began late in the autumn and lasted for three days. Soon they blurred together so closely that it was impossible to tell when one ended and another began. The madame allowed her body to have privacy in the back of the brothel, and the girls tended to her birth. One of the other whores was a midwife in another life. It was she that pointed out that she was losing too much blood. _We need a healer,_ she’d urged, and the madame sent for one, but warned that there were no healers that would wait on a knife-ear.

She was in agony for three days, in labor for _hours_ , but she pushed for only a few agonizing minutes. Strength leaked out of her in blood. Too much. Something inside of her tore, but no healer ever came, and none of the girls knew how to help. They tucked rags under her legs. She laid on the floor and bled out as they put her son in her arms.

An elf. Not human.

His beautiful brown skin was coated with a white, waxy substance that she weakly cleaned off him with a rag. His ears were pointed, and his wispy curls were blond. Her strength was fading but his was unrelenting. He screamed and cried and flailed his tiny little fists.

She burst into tears for the first time since her husband died and thought, to herself, how their son looked so much like him. It had to be Mythal, giving her this one kindness, in the last hours of her life. An elven son too loud to be silenced by this cruel human world.

She named him Zevran.

_Ze’ev_ , a word that her Keeper told her meant _rebel_ , and _renan_ , the word for _voice_. He howled in her arms and quieted only when she managed to get him to latch. She watched him in blissful, fading adoration.

His name was her wish for him. She had settled on it long ago, searching through her mind for the scraps of elvish she still remembered but had never written down. It was around the same time that she’d decided she was having a boy. And that was another mercy. A boy born in a land that valued men above women.

She wanted him to be as rebellious and terrifying as the Dread Wolf. She wanted him to strike fear into the hearts of shemlen. She wanted him to be fierce, and she wanted him to escape the violent lands of human men and return to her clan. If not her clan, then _a_ clan. His name was the only blessing she could impart upon him.

Be rebellious.

Be terrifying.

Be the thing that keeps the shemlen up at night.

She wanted him to take the world in his teeth and break it between his jaws. Survive _everything_ the shemlen would put him through. And they would try. Even if he escaped the city, they would hound his heels and burn his holdings and slaughter those he loved. She prayed that Dirthamen and his ravens would watch over her son. She prayed that Fen’Harel would swallow those who brought him harm.

She handed her gloves to the whore that was once a midwife. _His inheritance_ , she said, a reminder of where he’d come from.

Then she sang a lullaby to her son, her baby Zevran, and hoped that some part of him would always remember the elvish words that carried him to his first sleep:

 _Elgara vallas, da’len_  
_Melava somniar_  
_Mala taren aravas_  
_Ara ma’desen melar_

 _Iras ma ghilas, da’len_  
_Ara ma’nedan ashir_  
_Dirthara lothlenan’as_  
_Bal emma mala dir_

 _Tel’enfenim, da’len_  
_Irassal ma ghilas_  
_Ma garas mir renan_  
_Ara ma’athlan vhenas_  
_Ara ma’athlan vhenas_


End file.
